New testing by Louisiana State Racing Commission results in 10 drug positives

Ten horses that raced at Louisiana tracks tested positive recently for the powerful pain-killing drug dermorphin, and the Louisiana State Racing Commission is gathering information to determine which trainers might be charged with rule violations, executive director Charlie Gardiner said Thursday.

Dermorphin is an opiod peptide - an amino acid found naturally in certain species of frogs but likely is being synthetically produced for improper use in horses, said Steven Barker, a chemist who is head of the state testing laboratory at LSU.

“It’s far more potent than morphine,” Barker said.

There’s no legitimate use for dermorphin in racing, he said. “This drug in horses is an abuse of the horse,” he said. “This puts the horse’s life in danger. It puts the jockey’s life in danger. This is an attempt to cheat. This is bad stuff. This is doping.”

The horses - thoroughbreds and quarter horses - come from the stables of eight trainers, Gardiner said. Three of the horses raced at Evangeline Downs, six raced at Delta Downs and one raced at Louisiana Downs, Gardiner said.

“The trainers have been notified, and split samples are being processed right now,” he said. It’s too early in the process for the names of the trainers to be released, he said. There haven’t been stewards’ hearings on the cases.

When a horse tests positive for a drug not permitted for use in racing, the trainer has the right to ask for a split sample, often called a referee sample, to be analyzed by an out-of-state laboratory. If the referee lab doesn’t confirm the positive, the case against the trainer is dropped. If the referee lab confirms a positive, track stewards will hold a hearing on the matter and possibly issue a ruling.

In racing, the trainer is responsible for the condition of the horse.

A few trainers involved in these cases waived their rights to have split samples tested, Gardiner said.

In classifying drugs according to potential for abuse in racing, Racing Commissioners International puts dermorphin in Class I, which, according to the RCI website, comprises “stimulant and depressant drugs that have the highest potential to affect performance and that have no generally accepted medical use in the racing horse.”

Under Louisiana racing rules, the recommended penalty for a Class I violation is a suspension of at least a year and no more than five years, and a $5,000 fine. Because the maximum penalty that stewards at Louisiana tracks can give a trainer is either a suspension of six months or a $1,000 fine, the dermorphin cases in which the split samples test positive eventually will be referred by the stewards to the racing commission, Gardiner said. If the commission rules against a trainer, it can take into account aggravating or mitigating circumstances when deciding on penalties.

Barker said that regulators in Louisiana and other racing states have suspected for a while that dermorphin was being used at racetracks, but didn’t have a test for it.

“The test is new,” he said. “The drug has been available for quite some time. There’s not a company that actually selling it as a product. Somebody’s probably making it. You’d have to squeeze a lot of frogs to get that much. It’s coming from somebody who’s synthesizing it. We don’t know who.”

The LSU lab gained the capability to test for dermorphin from Industrial Laboratories, a Denver-area lab that does testing for several racing states, including Oklahoma.

There was a recent outbreak of dermorphin positives in Oklahoma, and the Oklahoma Racing Commission was looking for a referee lab, Barker said. The LSU lab agreed to test the split samples from Oklahoma and obtained the method from Industrial Laboratories, he said.

After testing those samples, “we started screening in Louisiana the next day,” Barker said. The lab soon found positives from Louisiana tracks.

“There’s a few more coming, but word has gotten out,” Barker said.

In Oklahoma, there were 15 such positives involving horses that ran at Will Rogers Downs and Remington Park, said Tino Rieger, executive director of the Oklahoma Racing Commission. “The cases are still under investigation,” Rieger said.

Barker said that in the last several months, several labs received syringes and containers in which dermorphin was present. The labs worked with the material to try to develop a test for the drug.

Rieger praised Industrial Laboratories for succeeding. “It’s through the diligence of Industrial Laboratories to come up with a method,” he said.

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Bob Fortus can be reached at rfortus@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3408.